Abstract
Bert Carlyle disliked the leftward course of American politics in the 1960s. As publisher and editor of the Lawrence Outlook, in his editorials and weekly columns Carlyle frequently railed against liberalism, communism, and all the other “isms” in which he believed “Left-wing” college professors were indoctrinating students at the University of Kansas. “What the gifted intellectuals fail to explain to the wide eyed, fuzzy-faced students,” he wrote after a 1965 student-led civil rights demonstration on campus, “is how their country and Kansas got where it is today; populated by the ‘prairie protestants’ who believe in corny ideals such as God, free enterprise and hard work.” Carlyle believed intellectuals had rejected the values of God, country, and capitalism, which to him were the cornerstones of Americanism. Moreover, America’s future rested in what Carlyle identified as the “real Americans,” the simple folk like the “prairie protestants” who had pushed across the frontier and settled Kansas a hundred years earlier. To make sense of the present and find solutions for the future, Bert Carlyle, like others in Lawrence, looked to the past, to the nation’s, and Kansas’s, myths and legends.1
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Notes
Bert Carlyle, “Kansas Colleges Offer All of the ‘Isms,” Lawrence Outlook (hereafter, LO), 1 April 1965.
David Dary, Lawrence, Douglas County Kansas: An Informal History (Lawrence, KS: Allen Books, 1982), 18–19.
In March 1855 the company became the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Dary, Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30. See also Samuel A. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1954).
Dary, Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas, 1. Books on Quantrill’s raid, particularly from the nineteenth century, abound. For a recent study see Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991).
“Colman Heads New England Society; Means Reminisces,” loose clipping, Lawrence Daily Journal-World (hereafter, LDJW), 22 December 1952, in Sons and Daughters of New England Papers (hereafter, SDNE), 1.5, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (hereafter, KC); John G. Whittier, “Emigrant[‘]s Hymn,” in SDNE “Seventy-Second Annual Reion” program, 9 December 1968, SDNE, 1.9. The complete poem can be found in Daniel W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (Topeka: Geo. W. Martin Kansas Publishing House, 1875), 39.
The “doctrine offirst effective settlement” suggests that a community’s character is shaped by the emigrant/cultural group, no matter how small, able to establish the first viable settlement. In Lawrence’s case, it was the Yankees from New England. See Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 13–14.
Although there are numerous examples, the best New England history of Lawrence is Richard Cordley, A History of Lawrence, Kansas, from the First Settlement to the Close of the Rebellion (Lawrence, KS: E. F. Caldwell, Lawrence Journal Press, 1895).
James R. Shortridge, “People of the New Frontier: Kansas Population Origs, 1865,” Kansas History 14:3 (Autumn 1991): 185; Dale Nimz, “Building
the Historic City: Significant Houses in East Lawrence” (master’s thesis, George Washington University, 1984), 72, (photocopy), KC; Clifford S. Griffin, The University of Kansas: A History (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1974), 11–13.
Wallace E. Galluggi to President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, 11 August 1970, and attachment [Disorientation], in President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Records of the University of Kansas (Lawrence) Investigative Team (hereafter, PCCU), box 8, “Miscellaneous Reference Material” folder; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 149.
Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion: Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 43; “town’s social life” quoted in Nimz, “Building the Historic City,” 72.
Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9–10; Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 37. Martin E. Marty agrees with Ellwood, suggesting that Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, the “colonial big three,” were of the elite, old-stock folk, while Methodists, the Disciples of Christ, and certain Baptists, the “frontier big three,” were more of the “common folk.” These class distinctions appear true in Lawrence. Church membership figures, however, are thin and inconsistent. My figures for Plymouth Congregational, Trinity Episcopal, and First Presbyterian come from Plymouth Congregational Church Papers, One Hundred Sixth Annual Report, 18 January 1961, KC; Trinity Episcopal Church, “Parish Directory of Trinity Episcopal Church, Lawrence, Kansas, 1970–1971, Douglas County Historical Society (hereafter, DCHS); First Presbyterian Church, “United Presbyterian Women, First Presbyterian Church, Lawrence, Kansas, 1971,” and “Church Directory” n.d., DCHS.
See Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Commuties Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Touchstone, 1988).
James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authentity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Coluia University Press, 1998); on white resistance and Christianity, see Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second
Reconstruction, 1954–1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 159–188, and Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 295–305.
Zelinsky, Cultural Geography of the United States, 97, 118–119, and Raymond D. Gastil, Cultural Regions of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 29, both cited in Shortridge, “People of the New Frontier,” 162, 166–167.
Elmer L. Craik, “Southern Interest in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1858,” Kansas Historical Collections, 1919–1922 15 (1923): 437–48, cited in Shortridge, “People of the New Frontier,” 170.
As quoted in Dale Nimz, Living With History: A Historic Preservation Plan for Lawrence, Kansas (Lawrence, KS: Urban Study Project, 1983), 63, KC.
On black migration to Kansas see especially Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1986), with a new introduction by the authors, Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), and Jacob U. Gordon, Narratives of African Americans in Kansas, 1870–1992: Beyond the Exodust Movement (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1993).
F. W. Blackmar and E. W. Burgess, Lawrence Social Survey: A Report to the Lawrence Social Survey Committee, Lawrence, Kansas (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1917), 10–11; Shortridge, “People of the New Frontier,” 177; Tom Schmiedeler, “Perceptual Regions of Lawrence, Kansas” (master’s thesis, University Of Kansas, 1985), 39–44; North Lawrence Civic Association, Early History of North Lawrence (Lawrence, KS: North Lawrence Civic Association, 1930), in North Lawrence vertical file, DCHS.
Lawrence Douglas County-National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (LDC-NAACP), “Survey of the Lawrence Negro Commuty,” September 1963–March 1964 (hereafter, NAACP “Survey,” 1963), in Lawrence League for the Practice of Democracy Papers, (hereafter, LLPD), 2.14, KC.
Bill Moyers, Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1971), 103; Lawrence Social Survey, 11.
Katja Rampelmann, “Small Town Germans: The Germans of Lawrence, Kansas, from 1854 to 1918,” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas, 1993).
United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1960. Volume I, Characteristics of the Population. Part 18, Kansas (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 59, table 21.
Institute for Social and Environmental Studies, Kansas Statistical Abstract (Lawrence, KS: Institute for Social and Environmental Studies, 1971), 11; U.S. Census of Population: 1960, 53, table 20; enrollment figures are taken from the University of Kansas, Office of the Registrar, “Annual Report of the Director of Admissions and Registrar” for the years 1958–59 through 1972–73, all of which can be found in Office of Admissions and Records, Annual Report, box 1, 1958/59-, in University Archives, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.
See, for example, Nina Postlethwaite to the editor, LDJW, 14 April 1960; Paul O. Johnson to the editor, LDJW, 22 July 1960; “Comments on Local Affairs,” LO 8 March 1962; and “Whole City Must Benefit in Any Urban Renewal Project,” LO 29 March 1962.
Milan, interview. For more on the socioeconomic status of the black community, see Rusty L. Monhollon, “Away from the Dream’: The Roots of Black Power in Lawrence, Kansas, 1960–1975” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas, 1994), chapter 2.
U.S. Census of Population: 1960, 208, table 73; 220, table 77.
LDJW, 4 August 1942, as quoted in Dary, Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas, 336, 348; Cathy Ambler, “Identity Formation in the East Lawrence Neighborhood,” (unpublished paper for American Studies 770, 16 December 1991) 28, KC.
On the consumption habits of American youth in the post-World War II era, see Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 269–290. Enrollments figures are gleaned from the annual reports of the University of Kansas, Office of the Registrar.
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Monhollon, R.L. (2002). “The Homestead of the Free”. In: “This is America?”. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982407_2
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